Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday March 28, 2013 @06:59PM
from the take-a-look dept.

SternisheFan points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday March 28, 2013 @06:15PM
from the little-flyer dept.

yyzmcleod writes "Building on the work of last year's bionic creation, the Smart Bird, Festo announced that it will literally launch its latest creation, the BionicOpter, at Hannover Messe in April. With a wingspan of 63 cm and weighing in at 175 grams, the robotic dragonfly mimics all forms of flight as its natural counterpart, including hover, glide and maneuvering in all directions. This is made possible, the company says, by the BionicOpter's ability to move each of its four wings independently, as well as control their amplitude, frequency and angle of attack. Including its actuated head and body, the robot exhibits 13 degrees of freedom, which allows it to rapidly accelerate, decelerate, turn and fly backwards."

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Thursday March 28, 2013 @05:32PM
from the extend-freely dept.

Hot on the heels of the Gtk+ 3.8 release comes GNOME 3.8. There are a few general UI improvements, but the highlight for many is the new Classic mode that replaces fallback. Instead of using code based on the old GNOME panel, Classic emulates the feel of GNOME 2 through Shell extensions (just like Linux Mint's Cinnamon interface). From the release notes: "Classic mode is a new feature for those people who prefer a more traditional desktop experience. Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies, it adds a number of features such as an application menu, a places menu and a window switcher along the bottom of the screen. Each of these features can be used individually or in combination with other GNOME extensions."

An anonymous reader writes: Interoute are currently experiencing a network outage on the UK/Netherlands section of their Transmission network. Cause of the issue is a fibre break between UK and Netherland. [snip] OTDR completed and break location identified as a sub-sea break – cable repair ship now being arranged.

theodp writes: Richard Stallman rankled many with his good riddance to Steve Jobs' 'malign influence on people's computing.' But now RMS gets an amen-of-sorts from Harvard Law School Prof Jonathan Zittrain, who explains in The Personal Computer is Dead why you should be afraid — very afraid — of the snowballing replicability of the App Store Model. 'If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens,' warns Zittrain, 'we'll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we'll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.' Searchblog's John Battelle, who's also solidly in the tear-down-this-walled-garden camp, adds: 'I'm not a nerd, quite, but I’m sure angry.' Are Stallman's views on their way to becoming positively mainstream?

althanas writes: The action begins around 4:45 am Pacific Standard Time when the red shadow of Earth first falls across the lunar disk. By 6:05 am Pacific Time, the Moon will be fully engulfed in red light. This event—the last total lunar eclipse until 2014—is visible from the Pacific side of North America, across the entire Pacific Ocean to Asia and Eastern Europe. For people in the western United States the eclipse is deepest just before local dawn. Not only will the Moon be beautifully red, it will also be inflated by the Moon illusion.

InterGuru writes: "Tom Murphy, blogging from UCSD in his Do the Math blog asks' I am curious to know how potent human fuel can be. How many miles per gallon do we get as our own engines of transportation? '

He finds, after accounting for the energy intensity of American agriculture, which uses ten units of energy to get one unit of food energy, walking consumes 18-34 MPG of oil equivalent, and biking comes in at 70-130 MPG.Maybe if we switched to a more vegetarian diet, we could improve on this."

treellama writes: Nearly 12 year since Bungie released the source code for Marathon 2, the Aleph One team is thrilled to release version 1.0 of the Aleph One game engine. Aleph One is a Free software, cross platform game engine that supports all three original Marathon games with enhancements such as OpenGL and Internet play; as well as numerous third party mods known as "scenarios"

Easy to install full versions of Marathon, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity, now featuring high resolution graphics and modern widescreen HUD support, can be downloaded for free from the project website!

itwbennett writes: "Last month two Red Hat developers proposed to replace the 30-year-old syslog system with a new Journal daemon. Initial reaction was mostly negative and 'focused on the Journal's use of a binary key-value form of data to log system events,' says blogger Brian Proffit. But now, says Proffitt, it seems that the proposal to replace syslog has less to do with the fixing syslog's problems than with Red Hat's desire to go its own way with Linux infrastructure."

Freddybear writes: Digital forensics experts at Dartmouth have developed software that can analyze digital photos to rate how drastically they have been altered by digital editing techniques. "The Dartmouth research, said Seth Matlins, a former talent agent and marketing executive, could be “hugely important” as a tool for objectively measuring the degree to which photos have been altered."

adeelarshad82 writes: Researchers at MIT have developed an algorithm that determines which drivers will run a red light, within one to two seconds before a potential collision. The research based on 15,000 cars at a busy intersection monitored various factors to determine which cars were were likely to run a red light. They found that their predictions were correct about 85 percent of the time, which is about 15-20 percent better than existing traffic prediction algorithms.

MrSeb writes: "The Carrier IQ debacle is quickly spiralling out of control: First it was confirmed that Android devices on Sprint and AT&T had the keylogging software installed, and then late last night it emerged that CIQ is also buried deep within iOS. Since then, other manufacturers such as RIM and Nokia, and carriers like Verizon, have confirmed that Carrier IQ never goes anywhere near their devices. If you're stuck with an Android or iOS phone with Carrier IQ installed, though, here's how to remove it — or at least disable it."